I have a close friend whose mother is in her late seventies. She grew up in rural Victoria in the 1950s, one of five kids, father who worked the land, no central heating, no money to speak of.
Mark Zuckerberg's company just made one of the most unusual energy deals in tech history.
On April 28, 2001, a sixty-year-old American businessman climbed into a Russian Soyuz capsule on a launchpad in Kazakhstan and rode it into orbit . He wasn't a trained astronaut.
There's a version of confidence that performs. It posts the wins, names the boundaries out loud, repeats mantras in the morning, and tells you — often unprompted — that it has done the inner work.
We have a very confused picture of what authenticity actually looks like. The word gets attached to people who are large personalities, expressive, emotionally open in public, effortlessly candid about their inner life.
At some point in your thirties or forties, if you are paying attention, you might notice something quietly unsettling about your relationships.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that nobody warns you about and almost no one talks about, because the moment you try to describe it honestly, you sound like you are complimenting yourself.
My mother grew up in rural Australia in the seventies. She has told me stories about summers that sound, to modern ears, almost implausibly free.
I want to tell you the most important finding in happiness research, and I want to warn you in advance that it's going to sound obvious.
A few years ago I was doing everything right, by the standard definition of everything right.
Picture walking into a gathering of about thirty people you have never met. Good music, cold drinks, interesting conversation.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that the most socially gifted people know well.
There's a man I keep thinking about. I met him at a dinner in Saigon a few years ago, introduced to me as a friend of a friend.
Someone at a party once told me I seemed "a bit quiet." I smiled, nodded, and thought about it for the rest of the walk home.
Someone bumps into you on the street. You say sorry. A colleague asks for your input in a meeting.
I want to be honest here. This wasn't some calculated social experiment I ran with detached curiosity.
